EO Products

The following Earth Observation products are being developed within the project: Cultivated crop type map, Grassland mowing product, Vegetation status indicator, Agricultural practices monitoring product, together with the Interactive visualization services for satellite imagery and use-case products.

These products will build on an integrated use of both Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data. They will be delivered in WGS84 and in national projections and in a standard and open format with associated metadata. Their performance will be validated against in-situ data when available through the prototyping and demonstration activities of this project, which will be documented in validation reports.

Cultivated crop type map

The objective of this product is basically to discriminate crop types or crop type groups. Its level of thematic details and its format vary depending on the use case. Cultivated crop type map can be useful for assessing compliance with several CAP subsidy schemes or support measures:

crop diversification, by (i) indicate if the number of crops is higher than 2 or 3 at the farm-level and (ii) if the percentage distribution is compliant with regulation thresholding values at the farm-level,

permanent grassland by contributing the mapping of “grassland” or “permanent grassland” classes at the farm-level or at the national scale,

land abandonment, by contributing to an indicator of well-maintained or not abandoned fields,

claimless system, to support to pre-fill aid declarations.

Grassland mowing product

The objective of this product is to detect the mowing events with data ranges at parcel-level. It can be useful for assessing compliance with several CAP subsidy schemes or support measures:

crop diversification, by computing the necessity and the number of crops to be present at farm-level as well as the grassland which is excluded from diversification,

permanent grassland identification, by complementing the information about the total area of permanent grassland that will be known from the declarations,

EFA - catch crop and EFA - nitrogen-fixing crop, by contributing to the exclusion of the cultivated annual grasslands or to the consideration of any permanent (multiyear) grassland already included in “catch crops” and/or “nitrogen-fixing crops” list at farm-level,

land abandonment, by contributing to exclude already abandoned grassland fields,

LPIS update, by providing information on active grassland presence to be cross-checked against LPIS polygons,

claimless system, to support the decisions in terms of compliance with different schemes.

Vegetation status indicator

The objective of this product is to give information about the vegetation status and its growing condition. It has to be delivered as frequently as possible and it can be used as time profiles, or to derive metrics. It will never be the key element that will allow concluding on the compliance with a CAP scheme, but it has to be seen as a useful complement of information that can support other products in the compliancy decision.

The vegetation status indicator can be useful for assessing compliance with several CAP subsidy schemes or support measures:

crop diversification, by supporting the identification of the number of crops at the farm-level,

land abandonment, by supporting the evaluation of well-maintained or not abandoned parcels,

interactive visualization of satellite images, by providing, in near-real time if relevant, information on the growing vegetation,

LPIS update, by providing information on the vegetation growing conditions to be cross-checked against LPIS polygons,

claimless system, by supporting the decisions in terms of compliance with different schemes.

Agricultural practices monitoring product

The agricultural practices monitoring product will be aimed at (i) the identification of the agricultural practices of crop harvesting and ploughing of grasslands, and (ii) the comparison of farmer declarations of fallow lands or the growing of catch-crops/nitrogen-fixing crops, against remote sensing data. The extent of analysis is parcels of sizes greater than 1 ha, on which agricultural practices and compliance with national regulations are required to be checked.

Agricultural practices monitoring on these parcels of interest can be useful for assessing compliance with several CAP subsidy schemes or support measures:

crop diversification, by identifying the occurrence of crop harvest,

permanent grassland identification, by informing about the occurrence of events (ploughing, etc.) which could be not compliant with permanent grassland definition,

This product does not consist of a standard EO product but rather of a set of services, which can be integrated in PA's environment to support CAP-related processes. The objective of this set of services is twofold: allowing an easy visualisation of EO-related products through a standard web service and allowing cross-checking these EO-related products with data from the Paying Agencies (e.g. LPIS, declarations, etc.).

OGC standard compliant web mapping service providing RGB imagery and simple indicators shall be developed for the purpose of integration in GSAA, LPIS, CWRS and OTSC applications. The service will provide most recent cloudless image of Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-8 data (by using the TIME parameter of the service, it will also be possible to get the older images) and the datasets from the four EO products described above. Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-8 data will be atmospherically corrected (L2A) products, available as true and false colour mosaics, simple indices (e.g. EVI, NDVI) or other colour composites or indices (depending on the use case). All of Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-8 acquisitions from January 2016 onward will be available on a national scale and in native resolutions. Sentinel-1 imagery will be integrated as well to support insight in processes involving SAR data.

Application for provision of cross-check data will be developed to support on-line analysis on the data. It will support the following functionality:

query by LPIS parcel identifier (and similar identifier for other object types),

provision of an assessment of the validity of declared data together with accuracy of automatically calculated data - tabular data,